That was the point...BitCoin is great for people who got in early and mined a lot. But for everyone else, adopting it means essentially giving those early adopters stuff for free.
It's also the point of most pyramid schemes. Get in early and get the hell out before it all collapses and let some other poor bastard be the one out of pocket.. I don't see any fundamental difference with Bitcoin. The funny part is the whole "get in early" aspect may be what seals its doom, once Bitcoin matures, it's bound to spur a pile of Bitcoin wannabes which promise easy mining potential and the whole cycle will repeat, burning the people still stuck on the old system.
No, not in the minds of most people. It was always going to be pants; neither the anticipation or the expectation could possibly be matched.
If anyone connected with the [projectile vomits into nearby bucket] franchise, has any sense they'll do something genuinely innovative and interesting with it after they've earned a few dollars from the dup... er... people who bought this episode in the DN story.
Nobody hold their breath.
Hype / expectations or not, a technically competent game would probably been received pretty well. It seems like it wasn't that either.
I have a regular HDD. It takes about 60 seconds to resume from a hibernate. Hardly the end of the world and let's face it most people who come into work in the morning will turn on a PC and immediately walk off to make a coffee or something anyway.
And if you have 1000 iMac computers, you're wasting $50 or more a night as a sysadmin walks around the floor turning them on by hand for system updates, software installs, and virus scans, cursing dumb power policies, and Apple (for not having a real WOL).
Hibernating computers is not a dumb policy. It saves a lot of money in energy. It's too bad that governments & energy companies don't jack up the out of hours power rates to motivate companies to enforce it on all non-essential machines.
As for admins, if there isn't an app for OS X which pushes out updates remotely during the day or which can temporarily disable power saving when they are scheduled then there certainly should be.
Sorry, but if that's how you run a business (totally believing salespeople that are leeching from you, without bothering to once pick up a calculator or estimate / limit demand yourself), then you deserve everything you get.
You're right however at the same time, it is not unreasonable to think Groupon would have the experience and the long term interest to fairly advise and help its customers (small businesses) do the right thing. If they fuck them over such as not putting caps on number of vouchers or bilking them out of a large % of the sales, then those businesses will tell every other business along their street what a shitty service it is. Within no time, NO ONE will deal with Groupon.
Part of me suspects it's been designed as a scam since the beginning. A vehicle which is built on hype while the CEO and other stakeholders plunder as much as they can before the whole lot collapses. The sad thing is there is a kernel of a good idea, but the company that implements it properly will let businesses control the terms down the last T, set caps and keep 90% of the proceeds which are delivered in a timely fashion.
Actually, that's a sales guy motivated to make a sale.
You know what they call believing the sales guy?
Stupid.
I'm sure many burnt businesses would agree with you. Sadly Groupon and the fools who buy into it are the ones who'll ultimately suffer. If you brazenly fleece your customers they'll stop doing business with you.
And that's the funny thing. If Bitcoint becomes a success then someone is going to try a Bitcoin mk 2 so they can mine the coins in the new system before anyone else. Before you know it you have a sea of these stupid faux currencies with speculators jumping ship from one to the next.
I can't say either are perfect but Unity is closer to a traditional spatial desktop. It allows you to put icons on the desktop for example. It's one of the biggest annoyances I have with GNOME 3.0 where concessions to spatial work seems to gone out of the window. Though I think GNOME 3.0 does feel better thought through in other ways. At the minute I don't consider either adequate replacements for the old world but given a point release or two that addresses problems they should be.
Yes, but which is it: "just gotta fix this and that" broken, or "this thing is a complete mess" broken?
I'll take the latter, as my impression of Unity was pretty much the worst possible; absolutely nothing works as a regular user would expect. It's like they went out of their way to make things as cryptic and unfamiliar as possible. It's nearly unusable. Oh, and Gnome 3? It sucks too. Both are like a goddamn cell phone interface crammed into the desktop -- seems to be a trend now. Well, fuck this shit: it simply does not work!
My impression of Unity is it's broken but not fundamentally. The Ubuntu dropdown panel needs to be rewritten from scratch, the thing needs prefs to control its position and hide behaviour, it needs more taskbar style apps and that fucking global menu needs to be configurable for people who are not running on netbooks. After that it's just a desktop with a dock. GNOME 3.0 looks a lot slicker but it's not hard to find issues with it too. Both need work.
As ludicrous as schemes like liberty dollar are (basically an MLM scam), at least there is a precious metal to back it. So I suppose if you are going to be suckered by some alternate currency scheme, silver or gold at least provides a safety net of some sort. Of course, if a bunch of people did try to sell their silver all at once the base metal price would collapse so it's not necessarily a good investment. Look at the price of gold at the moment - it's a bubble waiting to burst.
Nobody can pay their taxes with diamonds, cars or units of work, either. But everyone can exchange those items for dollars and pay their taxes with those bills. You can trade bitcoins for other currency.
Yes, until there is a run on the exchanges and they shut themselves down. The sensible ones will be those who got in early, mined coins, sold them on and got the hell out for someone else to hold the bag when it all collapses. A bit like a pyramid scheme really.
Don't be ridiculous. There is an inner circle of people who coordinate attacks, who write the tools like LOIC, who facilitate communication & coordination, who hold crypto keys, who supply urls to attack and and prime the commands to launch attacks. They are the ringleaders. Pretending everyone is leaders is absurd.
What kind of business has that kind of profit margin where they can give hundreds or thousands of customers a 75% discount and still be profitable?
The kind that are always advertising 75% off sales?
75% off sales are not the norm. They're to get rid of stock where the alternative is a 100% loss of profit when the item spoils, goes out of fashion or otherwise becomes unsellable at any price.
The world is full of companies have failed because they didn't understand the market. It's not the fault of Groupon that she allowed herself to be talked into something that she clearly didn't understand. We're all adults here.
I realize it's naive but I expect most small business owners would defer to Groupon's judgement and experience of the market when they were entering a deal. The biggest red flag in the story was how the salesrep said the business could only have one promotion ever. That's not a company interested in building a relationship, that's a company only interested in taking the money and running. The funny part is if they fuck over enough businesses like this then word will get around and their profits will head south very quickly. A $30 billion valuation sounds absurdly inflated to me and I would be surprised if they were worth anything close to that in a few years.
Hashing is not obfuscation. It produces a one way digest of your password, which if properly salted and hashed is very difficult to recover. So a site which uses hashes can't send you a password reminder since it doesn't know what your password is. The danger is if the site doesn't salt properly an attacker can use a reverse hash lookup to figure out what the password is. In addition without salting if 2 or more users use the same password you can tell it instantly by looking for duplicate hashes.
Sites that encrypt passwords can recover them and can send you reminders. The danger with sites that use encryption is the key has to be sitting around somewhere on the login server and / or the database in order to make comparisons. If an attacker can hack the site they can probably recover the key. With the key they have plaintext passwords for everyone, even those who bothered to choose a strong password.
The strongest sites are probably those which hash AND encrypt and take care to put the service that does this on another locked down machine.
That's the one, PewPew. The game is fine and I don't fault the developer for working with what phones offer. Unfortunately screen controls just don't work and you can find yourself with sweaty hands or your fingers / screen literally sticking / jamming up after a while which is what happened with me. Smart phones are certainly powerful enough to do better games, it's just the controls that stink. If someone turned up with a controller api, including bluetooth support for 3rd party peripherals it would be so much easier to believe that they would supplant the traditional handheld console device.
I wish the media would hurry up and realize how stupid they sound saying "leaders of anonymous."
Someone holds the keys and coordinates attacks. Pretending that there is no one in the middle absurd. Pretending that there isn't an inner circle of occasional participants is doubly absurd. It may well be that the further out you go the more amorphous things become (i.e. all the morons volunteering to run LOIC) but there is definitely people in the middle who could be classified as and are ringleaders.
The 3DS will do fine but the Vita will flop, as has all recent portable game systems released by Sony. Their market now plays games on smartphones while the market for the 3DS are usually too young for expensive smartphones and people will buy it for the innovative 3D.
Well I've just said why phones suck for games, at least the kind traditional players want to play.
As for the 3DS's "innovative" 3D, it certainly hasn't helped sales which are falling faster than a lead balloon at the moment. Not that the 3D adds much to the experience except headaches which may explain why many people play with it disable or at its minimal setting. Stupid gimmicks only get you so far, it's games that count. If the 3DS doesn't start getting a flow of decent games it will falter and fail.
I have no idea what will happen with the Vita. On paper the hardware looks amazing and vastly superior to the 3DS but I see no reason to gamble with my money for an unproven device. I'll let reviews and the sales dictate whether I plonk down money for one when they actually turn up on sale.
p.
I also think that Vita could pull an ace out of its sleeve if they implement Kindle like contract free 3G access. Access to PSN and downloads should be completely free over partner networks. An always on device would be a killer feature and networks wouldn't complain because they'd be making money hand over fist by selling internet passes, multiplayer passes, VOIP credits and other services to their captive audience. Of course Sony isn't always known for doing the smart thing but we'll see.
People overwhelmingly like their arrangement with Apple and volunteer themselves to it. And so... the customer is right in this case. It's just not what we want. And so we go our own way and use different phones.
I expect to many people it doesn't even occur to them that it is an issue. However with the massive explosion to Android phones would suggest to some it does, or at least doesn't matter as much as Apple apologists maintain.
It's a huge problem. Finger games like Angry Birds are okay. Anything requiring a controller or shooting or responsiveness is bloody awful. I downloaded some kind of Geometry Wars clone for my Android phone. The game was great but it was virtually unplayable because the controls were gimped by the format. The game used two circles on the screen to represent thumbsticks but within 60 seconds you'd find your fingers sticking to the phone and your ship became virtually uncontrollable. It also rules out any kind of emulator play - I have a ZX Spectrum emulator (Marvin) which runs magnificently except for the fact you can't play any damned games through lack of proper controls.
The Experia Play looks interesting and at least it has some hard buttons but I think it needs a broader coalition of phone manufacturers and Google to come up with a reasonable game control specification, one which programmers can utilise if present and for phone makers to implement how they see fit. Perhaps it would have a couple of profiles from the most basic (roller ball / optical thing), to dpad, to analogue controllers. There should even be a requirement for the controller to be part of the phone, it could be a separate bluetooth thingy which meant 3rd party peripherals could fill the void.
So until smart phones get their act together I think there will be scope for the likes of the Vita & 3DS. Personally I expect the Vita to appear in some phone form factor at some point anyway. It's basically a tablet / phone anyway in its 3G format so it doesn't seem a huge leap to consider a hybrid although it would probably have to be smaller and run android or something to be of use in that capacity.
What do you mean, it's not completely useless? In one fell swoop VB.Net became an inferior language to C# with no benefits.
VB.and C# both compile down into the same thing and are interoperable so I really don't understand your point. Write in VB.NET if you have to, join it to something in C#, maybe throw in some managed / unmanaged DLLs written C++ and throw in some ActiveX..NET allows for it. VB.NET certainly doesn't appear to be lacking development effort what with lambda expressions, LINQ and other features being recent additions.
As for the language being inferior, yes I agree. VB language has *always* been inferior to its counterparts. MS patched it up in VB.NET to make it relatively sane and modern but it's still Basic. I would see no reason to recommend it anybody, even beginners and I see no reason MS should promote it over C#.
Yes, everyone knows about those 'migration' tools. They're crap and completely unnecessary. Why anyone should need to go through some arduous migration process and 'get advice' because they've invested in a product and in their code for many years I have absolutely no idea. Note that we're not talking about some minor incompatibilities and some porting here. It's a total break. Any vendor who gets you to do that needs to be dropped.
Then you can stick with VB6 then can't you? I fail to see why Microsoft should hold back time because you're not prepared to go through the effort of moving to a more modern environment even when piles of tools, documentation and assistance are offered to help you.
I'm afraid you can pontificate all you want but Visual Basic became popular for many business applications because it was specifically a rapid application development language and people were happy with the pseudo OO aspects because many people simply didn't need or want to be dragged into the whole pointless OO development brain damage life cycle. People who don't know that and tow the party line.......I doubt whether they've even used VB. That was a big reason why people used it.
I know it's a rapid application development environment. I explicitly said it succeeded in spite of the language because of the GUI aspects, the ability to knock forms together. And OO isn't brain damage.
I'm sure that's how you'd like things to be but history views it differently. A 'VB dialect over.Net' was not what anyone wanted. What people wanted was for their code to work with minimal effort. What happened was that a whole installed base of apps were cut off from future development overnight, few if any VB apps were re-written, no one was going to completely migrate and re-write millions of lines of code and as such VB.Net is nowhere near as popular as it's original incarnation. In fact, I don't even know why they called it VB.
Well install VB6 and your app will still build and compile with minimal effort. And if you have a project which has millions of lines of code you probably should stay put. As for VB.NET's popularity waning, I would not be surprised. There is little point to it except in a legacy role. I expect people who can grasp object oriented programming concepts would be more comfortable with C# anyway.
Great. Completely useless to the existing code already written in VB, but nevermind. It also became clear to everyone that VB.Net was totally useless. C# is the primary language to develop with in.Net and if you can do the same thing in all.Net languages and they only differ via syntax then why not just use C#? Witness how ActivePerl and Python sank like bricks.
No it's not completely useless at all. You could still write apps in VB even now - no one was forcing you to move and indeed there may be no point unless you need.NET features. And Microsoft and 3rd parties have always provide reasonable migration tools if you did choose to move. MS still provide migration tools and advice even now. It's certainly not a hands-off migration and it requires substantial effort but it is possible and unless VB programmers were complete morons, the differences between the two environments are not insurmountable to figure out.
VB was completely sane to develop with, once it got somewhere near good enough around version 5/6. I know it's not fashionable amongst many, but a massive number of business applications were written with it and you didn't have to deal with a lot of time consuming stuff like memory management as you did with C++ or full blown object oriented concepts that you just didn't need most of the time. It was a very sensible thing to develop with for many applications. What Microsoft should have done was implemented and improved classic VB but implemented it on top of.Net so all you needed was a recompile as with previous versions.
It wasn't sane at all. VB was a shoddy language with some pseudo OO aspects, a handful of not especially powerful helper methods and functions. It's saving grace was not the language but the GUI on top which allowed forms to be slapped together, bound to data without writing much code and OCX / ActiveX controls that allowed the crappy functionality to be extended in useful ways. It should have been no surprise to anyone that MS concluded it was so broken that it was better to implement a VB dialect over.NET and supply migration tools rather than continue polishing a turd.
Slashdot Mirror
That was the point...BitCoin is great for people who got in early and mined a lot. But for everyone else, adopting it means essentially giving those early adopters stuff for free.
It's also the point of most pyramid schemes. Get in early and get the hell out before it all collapses and let some other poor bastard be the one out of pocket.. I don't see any fundamental difference with Bitcoin. The funny part is the whole "get in early" aspect may be what seals its doom, once Bitcoin matures, it's bound to spur a pile of Bitcoin wannabes which promise easy mining potential and the whole cycle will repeat, burning the people still stuck on the old system.
No, not in the minds of most people. It was always going to be pants; neither the anticipation or the expectation could possibly be matched.
If anyone connected with the [projectile vomits into nearby bucket] franchise, has any sense they'll do something genuinely innovative and interesting with it after they've earned a few dollars from the dup... er ... people who bought this episode in the DN story.
Nobody hold their breath.
Hype / expectations or not, a technically competent game would probably been received pretty well. It seems like it wasn't that either.
I have a regular HDD. It takes about 60 seconds to resume from a hibernate. Hardly the end of the world and let's face it most people who come into work in the morning will turn on a PC and immediately walk off to make a coffee or something anyway.
And if you have 1000 iMac computers, you're wasting $50 or more a night as a sysadmin walks around the floor turning them on by hand for system updates, software installs, and virus scans, cursing dumb power policies, and Apple (for not having a real WOL).
Hibernating computers is not a dumb policy. It saves a lot of money in energy. It's too bad that governments & energy companies don't jack up the out of hours power rates to motivate companies to enforce it on all non-essential machines.
As for admins, if there isn't an app for OS X which pushes out updates remotely during the day or which can temporarily disable power saving when they are scheduled then there certainly should be.
it's also possible that Turkey is cracking down on dissidents, using Anonymous as a cover story.
Or more likely the dumbasses running LOIC left their IP addresses all over a crime scene making it easy for the cops to id them and haul them off.
Sorry, but if that's how you run a business (totally believing salespeople that are leeching from you, without bothering to once pick up a calculator or estimate / limit demand yourself), then you deserve everything you get.
You're right however at the same time, it is not unreasonable to think Groupon would have the experience and the long term interest to fairly advise and help its customers (small businesses) do the right thing. If they fuck them over such as not putting caps on number of vouchers or bilking them out of a large % of the sales, then those businesses will tell every other business along their street what a shitty service it is. Within no time, NO ONE will deal with Groupon.
Part of me suspects it's been designed as a scam since the beginning. A vehicle which is built on hype while the CEO and other stakeholders plunder as much as they can before the whole lot collapses. The sad thing is there is a kernel of a good idea, but the company that implements it properly will let businesses control the terms down the last T, set caps and keep 90% of the proceeds which are delivered in a timely fashion.
Actually, that's a sales guy motivated to make a sale.
You know what they call believing the sales guy?
Stupid.
I'm sure many burnt businesses would agree with you. Sadly Groupon and the fools who buy into it are the ones who'll ultimately suffer. If you brazenly fleece your customers they'll stop doing business with you.
And that's the funny thing. If Bitcoint becomes a success then someone is going to try a Bitcoin mk 2 so they can mine the coins in the new system before anyone else. Before you know it you have a sea of these stupid faux currencies with speculators jumping ship from one to the next.
Ouch my brain not parse so good today. Sorry I answered a question which wasn't asked.
I can't say either are perfect but Unity is closer to a traditional spatial desktop. It allows you to put icons on the desktop for example. It's one of the biggest annoyances I have with GNOME 3.0 where concessions to spatial work seems to gone out of the window. Though I think GNOME 3.0 does feel better thought through in other ways. At the minute I don't consider either adequate replacements for the old world but given a point release or two that addresses problems they should be.
Yes, but which is it: "just gotta fix this and that" broken, or "this thing is a complete mess" broken?
I'll take the latter, as my impression of Unity was pretty much the worst possible; absolutely nothing works as a regular user would expect. It's like they went out of their way to make things as cryptic and unfamiliar as possible. It's nearly unusable. Oh, and Gnome 3? It sucks too. Both are like a goddamn cell phone interface crammed into the desktop -- seems to be a trend now. Well, fuck this shit: it simply does not work!
My impression of Unity is it's broken but not fundamentally. The Ubuntu dropdown panel needs to be rewritten from scratch, the thing needs prefs to control its position and hide behaviour, it needs more taskbar style apps and that fucking global menu needs to be configurable for people who are not running on netbooks. After that it's just a desktop with a dock. GNOME 3.0 looks a lot slicker but it's not hard to find issues with it too. Both need work.
As ludicrous as schemes like liberty dollar are (basically an MLM scam), at least there is a precious metal to back it. So I suppose if you are going to be suckered by some alternate currency scheme, silver or gold at least provides a safety net of some sort. Of course, if a bunch of people did try to sell their silver all at once the base metal price would collapse so it's not necessarily a good investment. Look at the price of gold at the moment - it's a bubble waiting to burst.
Nobody can pay their taxes with diamonds, cars or units of work, either. But everyone can exchange those items for dollars and pay their taxes with those bills. You can trade bitcoins for other currency.
Yes, until there is a run on the exchanges and they shut themselves down. The sensible ones will be those who got in early, mined coins, sold them on and got the hell out for someone else to hold the bag when it all collapses. A bit like a pyramid scheme really.
I said nothing of the hash algorithm so your point is moot. And bcrypt uses salts too so nothing I said suddenly becomes invalid.
Don't be ridiculous. There is an inner circle of people who coordinate attacks, who write the tools like LOIC, who facilitate communication & coordination, who hold crypto keys, who supply urls to attack and and prime the commands to launch attacks. They are the ringleaders. Pretending everyone is leaders is absurd.
What kind of business has that kind of profit margin where they can give hundreds or thousands of customers a 75% discount and still be profitable?
The kind that are always advertising 75% off sales?
75% off sales are not the norm. They're to get rid of stock where the alternative is a 100% loss of profit when the item spoils, goes out of fashion or otherwise becomes unsellable at any price.
The world is full of companies have failed because they didn't understand the market. It's not the fault of Groupon that she allowed herself to be talked into something that she clearly didn't understand. We're all adults here.
I realize it's naive but I expect most small business owners would defer to Groupon's judgement and experience of the market when they were entering a deal. The biggest red flag in the story was how the salesrep said the business could only have one promotion ever. That's not a company interested in building a relationship, that's a company only interested in taking the money and running. The funny part is if they fuck over enough businesses like this then word will get around and their profits will head south very quickly. A $30 billion valuation sounds absurdly inflated to me and I would be surprised if they were worth anything close to that in a few years.
Sites that encrypt passwords can recover them and can send you reminders. The danger with sites that use encryption is the key has to be sitting around somewhere on the login server and / or the database in order to make comparisons. If an attacker can hack the site they can probably recover the key. With the key they have plaintext passwords for everyone, even those who bothered to choose a strong password.
The strongest sites are probably those which hash AND encrypt and take care to put the service that does this on another locked down machine.
That's the one, PewPew. The game is fine and I don't fault the developer for working with what phones offer. Unfortunately screen controls just don't work and you can find yourself with sweaty hands or your fingers / screen literally sticking / jamming up after a while which is what happened with me. Smart phones are certainly powerful enough to do better games, it's just the controls that stink. If someone turned up with a controller api, including bluetooth support for 3rd party peripherals it would be so much easier to believe that they would supplant the traditional handheld console device.
I wish the media would hurry up and realize how stupid they sound saying "leaders of anonymous."
Someone holds the keys and coordinates attacks. Pretending that there is no one in the middle absurd. Pretending that there isn't an inner circle of occasional participants is doubly absurd. It may well be that the further out you go the more amorphous things become (i.e. all the morons volunteering to run LOIC) but there is definitely people in the middle who could be classified as and are ringleaders.
The 3DS will do fine but the Vita will flop, as has all recent portable game systems released by Sony. Their market now plays games on smartphones while the market for the 3DS are usually too young for expensive smartphones and people will buy it for the innovative 3D.
Well I've just said why phones suck for games, at least the kind traditional players want to play.
As for the 3DS's "innovative" 3D, it certainly hasn't helped sales which are falling faster than a lead balloon at the moment. Not that the 3D adds much to the experience except headaches which may explain why many people play with it disable or at its minimal setting. Stupid gimmicks only get you so far, it's games that count. If the 3DS doesn't start getting a flow of decent games it will falter and fail.
I have no idea what will happen with the Vita. On paper the hardware looks amazing and vastly superior to the 3DS but I see no reason to gamble with my money for an unproven device. I'll let reviews and the sales dictate whether I plonk down money for one when they actually turn up on sale. p. I also think that Vita could pull an ace out of its sleeve if they implement Kindle like contract free 3G access. Access to PSN and downloads should be completely free over partner networks. An always on device would be a killer feature and networks wouldn't complain because they'd be making money hand over fist by selling internet passes, multiplayer passes, VOIP credits and other services to their captive audience. Of course Sony isn't always known for doing the smart thing but we'll see.
People overwhelmingly like their arrangement with Apple and volunteer themselves to it. And so... the customer is right in this case. It's just not what we want. And so we go our own way and use different phones.
I expect to many people it doesn't even occur to them that it is an issue. However with the massive explosion to Android phones would suggest to some it does, or at least doesn't matter as much as Apple apologists maintain.
The Experia Play looks interesting and at least it has some hard buttons but I think it needs a broader coalition of phone manufacturers and Google to come up with a reasonable game control specification, one which programmers can utilise if present and for phone makers to implement how they see fit. Perhaps it would have a couple of profiles from the most basic (roller ball / optical thing), to dpad, to analogue controllers. There should even be a requirement for the controller to be part of the phone, it could be a separate bluetooth thingy which meant 3rd party peripherals could fill the void.
So until smart phones get their act together I think there will be scope for the likes of the Vita & 3DS. Personally I expect the Vita to appear in some phone form factor at some point anyway. It's basically a tablet / phone anyway in its 3G format so it doesn't seem a huge leap to consider a hybrid although it would probably have to be smaller and run android or something to be of use in that capacity.
What do you mean, it's not completely useless? In one fell swoop VB.Net became an inferior language to C# with no benefits.
VB.and C# both compile down into the same thing and are interoperable so I really don't understand your point. Write in VB.NET if you have to, join it to something in C#, maybe throw in some managed / unmanaged DLLs written C++ and throw in some ActiveX. .NET allows for it. VB.NET certainly doesn't appear to be lacking development effort what with lambda expressions, LINQ and other features being recent additions.
As for the language being inferior, yes I agree. VB language has *always* been inferior to its counterparts. MS patched it up in VB.NET to make it relatively sane and modern but it's still Basic. I would see no reason to recommend it anybody, even beginners and I see no reason MS should promote it over C#.
Yes, everyone knows about those 'migration' tools. They're crap and completely unnecessary. Why anyone should need to go through some arduous migration process and 'get advice' because they've invested in a product and in their code for many years I have absolutely no idea. Note that we're not talking about some minor incompatibilities and some porting here. It's a total break. Any vendor who gets you to do that needs to be dropped.
Then you can stick with VB6 then can't you? I fail to see why Microsoft should hold back time because you're not prepared to go through the effort of moving to a more modern environment even when piles of tools, documentation and assistance are offered to help you.
I'm afraid you can pontificate all you want but Visual Basic became popular for many business applications because it was specifically a rapid application development language and people were happy with the pseudo OO aspects because many people simply didn't need or want to be dragged into the whole pointless OO development brain damage life cycle. People who don't know that and tow the party line.......I doubt whether they've even used VB. That was a big reason why people used it.
I know it's a rapid application development environment. I explicitly said it succeeded in spite of the language because of the GUI aspects, the ability to knock forms together. And OO isn't brain damage.
I'm sure that's how you'd like things to be but history views it differently. A 'VB dialect over .Net' was not what anyone wanted. What people wanted was for their code to work with minimal effort. What happened was that a whole installed base of apps were cut off from future development overnight, few if any VB apps were re-written, no one was going to completely migrate and re-write millions of lines of code and as such VB.Net is nowhere near as popular as it's original incarnation. In fact, I don't even know why they called it VB.
Well install VB6 and your app will still build and compile with minimal effort. And if you have a project which has millions of lines of code you probably should stay put. As for VB.NET's popularity waning, I would not be surprised. There is little point to it except in a legacy role. I expect people who can grasp object oriented programming concepts would be more comfortable with C# anyway.
Great. Completely useless to the existing code already written in VB, but nevermind. It also became clear to everyone that VB.Net was totally useless. C# is the primary language to develop with in .Net and if you can do the same thing in all .Net languages and they only differ via syntax then why not just use C#? Witness how ActivePerl and Python sank like bricks.
No it's not completely useless at all. You could still write apps in VB even now - no one was forcing you to move and indeed there may be no point unless you need .NET features. And Microsoft and 3rd parties have always provide reasonable migration tools if you did choose to move. MS still provide migration tools and advice even now. It's certainly not a hands-off migration and it requires substantial effort but it is possible and unless VB programmers were complete morons, the differences between the two environments are not insurmountable to figure out.
VB was completely sane to develop with, once it got somewhere near good enough around version 5/6. I know it's not fashionable amongst many, but a massive number of business applications were written with it and you didn't have to deal with a lot of time consuming stuff like memory management as you did with C++ or full blown object oriented concepts that you just didn't need most of the time. It was a very sensible thing to develop with for many applications. What Microsoft should have done was implemented and improved classic VB but implemented it on top of .Net so all you needed was a recompile as with previous versions.
It wasn't sane at all. VB was a shoddy language with some pseudo OO aspects, a handful of not especially powerful helper methods and functions. It's saving grace was not the language but the GUI on top which allowed forms to be slapped together, bound to data without writing much code and OCX / ActiveX controls that allowed the crappy functionality to be extended in useful ways. It should have been no surprise to anyone that MS concluded it was so broken that it was better to implement a VB dialect over .NET and supply migration tools rather than continue polishing a turd.